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A Hacker Named "The Virus"

Neal Chadwick

Published by Alfred Bekker, 2018.

He calls himself "The Virus" - and he is one of the most notorious hackers of all time. And he tries to make the coup of his life by cracking the access codes of the Pentagon computers and trying to sell them to the Chinese secret service.

Soon he will be a hunted man fighting for his life. And the FBI investigators are the least of his problems...

2018 of the digital edition by AlfredBekker/CassiopeiaPress, Lengerich/Westphalia

COLE'S FINGERS TICKED nervously on the steering wheel of the black Mitsubishi. He looked at the Rolex on his wrist.

5:00 p.m. Rush hour. In front of the traffic lights at the corner of Bedford Street/Seventh Avenue there was a traffic jam like almost everywhere in Manhattan.

In front of Coles Mitsubishi was a van, on the right a limousine, behind it a convertible with a sun-drenched blonde at the wheel. On the left he noticed a sports car with two young men.

Then the traffic light changed. But the van in front of him wasn't moving an inch.

Instead, the doors opened. Masked ones jumped out. They wore MPis and bulletproof vests, plus balaclavas that only released the eye area.

Cole ducked just in time before the first volley broke the windshield of the Mitsubishi.

He lowered his upper body to the side and covered the narrow diplomatic suitcase lying in the front passenger seat.

An automatic pistol with attached silencer and an ordinary hand grenade, as it was in use until today in the Army.

Cole snatched the hand grenade, pulled the trigger with her teeth and threw it through the smashed windshield.

Before the grenade detonated, one of the killers from the van had reached the side window of the Mitsubishi, the MPi lifted.

The balaclava turned red. He was torn back, staggered. Then the detonation of the hand grenade sounded.

Cole lay across the driver and passenger seats of the Mitsubishi, curving like an embryo. He protected his face with his hands. The heat was murderous.

Then there was the next explosion. The fire caused by the hand grenade had apparently eaten its way to the tank.

Cole opened the passenger door, pushed the suitcase out, crawled behind and then rolled off onto the asphalt.

A horn concert could be heard, in between the distant sirens of police, fire brigade and emergency service.

One of the masked killers ran like a living torch across Bedford Street to Seventh Avenue. The squeaking of brakes mixed with his screams. A traffic chaos arose. Most of the cars at the intersection were wedged in. There were some minor rear-end collisions here and there. Panic voices were heard.

The blonde in the sports car stared at him. For a moment Cole considered taking her hostage, but her sports car was jammed. She couldn't leave.

But even before he could pull the trigger, one jolt went through his body, fractions of a second later another.

The blonde in the sports car held a silencer gun in her hand, then hid it in her windbreaker and closed the zipper. The motorcyclist came near, stopped just before Cole died.

The driver bent down, picked up the suitcase. The blonde got out of the sports car and then sat behind the motorcyclist.

The driver let the engine howl, steered the machine past the dead man and then roared away on a zigzag course through the cars standing around.

WHEN WE ARRIVED AT the scene on Bedford Street/Seventh Avenue, there was still chaos. There were cars everywhere. Traffic was jammed all the way to Seventh Avenue. Colleagues from the city police were busy diverting traffic. The officials of the Scientific Research Division, the central identification service of all New York police authorities, needed time to carry out their job with the necessary thoroughness.

Lieutenant Jesper O. Thomson of Homicide Squad II of the 23rd precinct greeted Milo Tucker and me. We approached the place of the event on hidden paths, left the sports car in a side street and walked the last ten minutes behind us.

"I didn't think you'd make it this fast," Thomson said. I knew him from a refresher course in small-bore shooting. "They'll even get here before the coroner."

Thomson shrugged his shoulders. "The reason we have informed the FBI is that what has happened here is probably a clash in the area of organized crime."

Through our informants, we had no information that would lead us to expect anything like this. But that didn't have to mean anything.

"There has been a greater detonation. The few testimonies my colleagues have received so far are quite confused," reported Lieutenant Thomson.

"But it is certain that a crew of four or five heavily armed gorillas sat in the burnt-out van. They jumped out and went after the black Mitsubishi's driver..."

Thomson nodded. "He was well prepared for an attack. But apparently not good enough..." Thomson led us to a dead man who had been struck by two hits. "The man is carrying two passports. One is in the name of Lester Greenhouse, the other is a British passport in the name of Peter J. Duncan Jr."

"If nothing has been done about this man's position, he hasn't been shot from the van," I noted.

The ballistics experts still have a few puzzles to solve. But as for the van... This was reported stolen by its owner yesterday."

Milo looked at the dead lying around the van. Some were charred beyond recognition.

"One of the guys ran on fire on Seventh Avenue," Thomson reported. "The pain must have nearly taken his mind away. A truck hit him deadly."

I pointed to a convertible that was only a few meters away from the black Mitsubishi.

"WHERE THE HELL ARE you going, Bruce?" called the young woman. The airstream whirled her blond hair pretty messed up. She clung to Bruce's back with her right hand while the left clasped around the handle of the narrow suitcase. The case was trapped between her and Bruce. It contained everything that mattered.

He probably didn't even understand them. The airstream and traffic noise swallowed everything. They had just come to light again on the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel. The highway made a kind of loop before it ran across Union City.

Bruce took the next exit to Weehawken and then headed towards the port facilities and piers. He turned off in a parking lot and then brought the machine to a standstill with an emergency stop. The rear wheel of the Kawasaki broke out easily, but Bruce had the machine under control.

He proved that on the hell slalom behind them. On the corner of Bedford Street and Seventh Avenue it had been really hot. Bruce had driven between the wedged vehicles at an almost breakneck speed.

She got off the plane. She kept the suitcase in her hand. The light windbreaker she was wearing was rather bulged out by the silencer gun. She stroked her hair a little smooth.

He had an angular face with very large-pored skin. The nose looked like it had been broken at some point.

Vonda hesitated. The next second Bruce reached under his leather jacket. Like lightning, he ripped out a short-handed revolver. The muzzle pointed to Londa's forehead. Vonda froze.

He held out his left while he continued to point the gun at Vonda with his right. "Give me that automatic you're wearing under your jacket! I don't want to take any chances."

He owed her the answer. Hesitantly, she took her gun out from under her windbreaker.

He approached her, approached her until he took one step. His left hand literally tore the gun out of her hand. For a second Vonda had considered defending herself, but then she decided it was too risky. Bruce was a good shot. And at that short range, every shot he fired was fatal.

Bruce grimaced. He lifted his left hand, pointed the automatic silencer at Londa's head and pulled the trigger.

"Sorry, baby, but there was no room for you in this game," he muttered in a low voice. He put the short-handed revolver in his jacket pocket. Then he used a handkerchief to wipe any fingerprints from the automatic that he had taken from Vonda.

Bruce stepped on the dead woman, crouched down and put the gun in her hand. He then placed the muzzle of the silencer exactly where he had hit Vonda.

With the fingers of the dead, he pulled the trigger back and pulled the trigger.

Bruce turned the dead woman around. The bullet had emerged from the back of the skull and had eaten its way into the soft gravel. Bruce dug up the bullet and put it in his pocket.

Bruce turned around. He put the money case on the back of his Kawasaki. A million dollars in used notes. Money, knows how nobody could have laundered it.

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON we had the identity of the dead Mitsubishi driver. His real name was Desmond E. Cole. He did eight years for manslaughter in Huntsville.

After his release he had gone into hiding, probably worked for the underworld as a hit-man - as a wage killer. Anyway, in one case he left fingerprints and a cigarette butt. Later, he was smarter. His trail had been lost and was hardly identifiable even by careful analysis of the way he worked.

We had to wait a little longer for the exact analysis of the probable course of events by our office staff. The case was complicated. But we hoped that the colleagues were ready the next morning. Then I'm sure there was a ballistics report. And perhaps by then it had even been possible to identify some of the armed men who had been in the van.

The explosion had made it impossible to take fingerprints of everyone who could use AIDS, our computer-aided AUTOMATED IDENTIFICATION SYSTEM for fingerprints.

Colleagues of the City Police had noted down dozens of car numbers in order to be able to identify and question possible witnesses even later. The questioning of witnesses at the scene of the crime had so far only given a diffuse picture.

In several statements, however, there was talk of a motorcyclist who had to be driven quite ruthlessly through the chaos - with a young blonde in the back seat.

A witness - even a motorcycle fan - said he remembered that it was a Kawasaki. Whether the Kawasaki driver and his beautiful co-driver had anything to do with the case was not yet quite clear.

Cole proved himself a pro when he used it. He hadn't created a phone book in the menu. All we had were the last ten accepted and self-chosen calls, their time, duration and cost.

In self-chosen conversations Cole had again managed to cover the tracks with a trick. All connections were made via the manual exchange service of his mobile phone company, so that only his number always appeared in the menu and not that of the call partner. It could be a day or two before we had the complete list of connections from the telephone company. Did the accepted conversations remain.

There were two short calls from a certain Mark Sorello. The first one last night, around 8pm, the second about an hour before hell broke out on the corner of Bedford Street and Seventh Avenue.

Milo whistled through his teeth when Mark Sorello's picture appeared on the computer screen we had in our duty room.

We flew over the details, which were listed neatly next to the photo. Mark Jefferson Sorello, born on February 24, 1980, in the computer hacker scene known under the pseudonym'BigByte'. His passion for the computer had already caused him many difficulties, including a suspended sentence. At 19, he was noticed for hacking into the FBI's networked data systems. We could say we were lucky to have obviously only had to deal with a joker at that time. Mark'BigByte' Sorello had replaced all the faces of the criminals wanted on our website with the heads of Micky Maus and Donald Duck.

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A Hacker Named 'The Virus'

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